Credit growth slows, bank deposits shrink in July

China's credit expansion slowed in July while bank deposits declined, the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, said on Friday.

The country's new yuan-denominated loans totaled 16.08 trillion yuan ($2.22 trillion) in the first seven months of the year, representing a growth of 1.67 trillion yuan compared with the same period of last year, the PBOC said.

In July, however, new yuan-denominated loans came in at 345.9 billion yuan, down by 349.8 billion yuan from a year ago and slumping from 3.05 trillion yuan in June. Meanwhile, yuan-denominated deposits decreased by 1.12 trillion yuan last month, reversing an increase of 3.71 trillion yuan in June.

Aggregate social financing — the total amount of financing to the real economy — also decelerated as the increment in aggregate social financing amounted to 528.2 billion yuan in July, down by 270.3 billion yuan year-on-year, the central bank said.

The country's outstanding aggregate social financing stood at 365.77 trillion yuan as of the end of July, marking a year-on-year growth of 8.9 percent, compared with 9 percent a month earlier.

The broad money supply, or M2, stood at 285.4 trillion yuan as of the end of last month, up 10.7 percent year-on-year. The growth rate was 0.6 percentage point down from a month earlier and 1.3 percentage points lower than a year ago.